Meghan Markle: I used to think I was never good enough

NOTTINGHAM, ENGLAND – DECEMBER 01: Meghan Markle attends the Terrance Higgins Trust World AIDS Day charity fair at Nottingham Contemporary on December 1, 2017 in Nottingham, England. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement on Monday 27th November 2017 and will marry at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle in May 2018. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Meghan Markle’s life was changed after she was told she was enough

The Suits actress – who is set to marry Prince Harry next May – battled self-confidence issues when she was younger and credits a casting director called April Webster for helping her cope with her low self-esteem.

She shared: “I was in my early 20s, still figuring so much out, and trying to find my value in an industry that judges you on everything that you’re not versus everything that you are. Not thin enough, not pretty enough, not ethnic enough, while also being too thin, too ethnic, too pretty the very next day.

“It felt unapologetically impossible, and I spent my evenings eating my feelings with grilled cheese sandwiches and cheap wine. There was a casting director named April Webster who has basically casted everything of note from TV to film for close to two decades (think Lost and Mission Impossible). I had never met her before, and at my very first audition for her, she stopped me mid-scene and said so simply, “You need to know that you’re enough.”

The 36-year-old actress was urged by the casting director to be “less make-up [and] more Meghan”

Writing for Darling magazine in an article that has resurfaced as she prepares to marry Prince Harry, she added: “I was breathless. No one had ever seen it, or perhaps no one had ever called me out, but there in that small box of a room in Burbank, this woman I had never met saw me. My gut reaction was to smile. To smile hard. Maybe that would keep the tears tucked behind my draping eyes.

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“It wouldn’t have mattered if I cried, because she saw me. She saw all that self-doubt beaming through the self-tanner and excessive blush.

“‘You need to know that you’re enough,’ she said. ‘Less make-up, more Meghan.’ She went on to say that I was like a ‘shrinking violet,’ wilted joy and energy and exuberance behind this shroud of insecurity. You couldn’t pay for a therapy session this good. And that moment, for me, was a wake-up call.”